Modeling Keyword Search Strategy: Analysis of Pharmacovigilance Specialists' Search of MedDRA Terms.

In the information retrieval task, searching and choosing keywords to form the query is crucial. The present study analyzes and describes the keywords' search strategy into a thesaurus in the field of pharmacovigilance. Two ergonomics experts shadowed 22 pharmacovigilance specialists during their daily work. They focus on the strategies for searching and choosing MedDRA terms to build pharmacovigilance queries. Interviews of four pharmacovigilance specialists completed the observations. Results highlight that, for unusual or complex searches, pharmacovigilance specialists proceed iteratively in three main phases: (i) preparation of a list of terms and of evaluation criteria, (ii) exploration of the MedDRA hierarchy and choice of a term, and (iii) evaluation of the results against the criteria. Overall, the search and the choice of keywords within a thesaurus shares similarity with the information retrieval task and is closely interwoven with the query building process. Based on the results, the paper proposes design specifications for new interfaces supporting the identification of MedDRA terms so that pharmacovigilance reports searches achieve a good level of expressiveness.